How to split the phone call?

New Comcast phone service, but old jacks no longer work

• My mom switched to land-line phone service through Comcast, but now she only has one working phone jack. How do we restore functionality to the remaining outlets in the house? [This question is a bit long, but if you want to skim it, I think you can get by just reading the non-small text] My mom recently switched to Comcast for cable/internet/phone. Cable and internet are fine, but it's the phone portion that's causing trouble. Her house has a phone jack in each room. Back when she had "normal" phone service, the phones worked in every room. Since she changed to Comcast now there's only one phone outlet in the house that works. Looking at the Comcast black box (that the cable from outside plugs into), there's a short phone cord (photo of the back of the Comcast box with phone cord circled http://tinyurl.com/9otlpk) that runs from the box to a little Comcast-installed connector-box on the wall. Looking at the little connector-box, I could see that from there, a wire seems to run down through a hole in the floor to the basement. I'm guessing that during installation, the Comcast guy drilled this hole, went down to the basement and ran some phone cord from there over to just one phone jack (which is why it is just that one phone jack in the dining room that now works). The problem is, we want her to go back to having phone access in every room (or at least back to having a phone in her bedroom and one on the second floor) so that she can hear it. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem, we could just get her a cordless phone with 3 handsets and a charger for each room. However, my mom's hearing is not what it once was, so we want to get her a couple of phones with a blinking light, or something where you can plug in a lamp so that the lamp flashes when she gets a call. For this it seems like we'll need a phone jack in the same room where we want the flashing lights. She has a cordless phone with a flashing base, but of course the flashing base is tethered to the one working phone jack in the dining room, so she never sees it. This leads to a lot of missed calls for her. Anyway, long story-short... How do we restore functionality to the old phone jacks? I assume that the working phone cord would need to be "split" some way and then new wire fed to the old outlets... ? Is this something a phone guy can do? Can Comcast do this? (I'll give Comcast a call when I have some time to sit on hold, but they're closed now and I thought maybe some fellow MeF's had run into a similar problem and might have some good advice.) Thanks in advance

• Answer:

  Yes, a phone/network guy can fix this. And it is quite likely that Comcast should have fixed it as part of the installation fee (they offered to do so when my mother got Comcast telephony). I would definitely start with calling Comcast customer service and complaining that they did not connect all the jacks in the house (or even offer to do so for an additional fee). You could also likely fix this yourself with some pretty simple rewiring. It may be as simple as making sure the old Bell phoneline is no longer connected and using a phone cable and plugging it into both the Comcast modem and an existing wall jack. http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/20/how-to-wiring-voip-to-your-phone-jacks is not exactly what your trying to do, but may help. If you're not comfortable with that, call Comcast or a home networking professional.